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A conversation with Deep Rising filmmaker Matthieu Rytz about the promise and the peril of mining the ocean floor.
“To say, ‘Don’t harm the ocean’ — it is the easiest message in the world, right? You just have to show a photo of a turtle with a straw in its nose,” Michael Lodge, the secretary general of the U.N.’s International Seabed Authority, toldThe New York Times last year. “Everybody in Brooklyn can then say, ‘I don’t want to harm the ocean.’ But they sure want their Teslas.”
Canadian filmmaker Matthieu Rytz apparently didn’t get the memo. Deep Rising, his new documentary narrated by Jason Momoa, aims at one of the great contradictions of the energy transition: that deep-sea mining could provide a wealth of copper, nickel, and cobalt, the battery materials that are critically needed for EVs and clean-energy storage — and could also trigger ecological collapse in the fragile Pacific Ocean abyss.
At the center of this debate is the International Seabed Authority, a Jamaica-based U.N. organization tasked with the conflicting goals of protecting the ocean floor and writing regulations for the extraction of “polymetallic nodules.” The metal-rich nodules are sprinkled across an internationally governed part of the Pacific called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which starts about 500 miles south of Hawaii and by some measurements stretches roughly twice the size of India. By the estimate of The Metals Company, which has a multi-billion-dollar stake in an eventual mining operation, the supply of nodules would be enough to eventually power “280 million electric vehicles.”
At the same time, scientists — including a whistleblower from inside The Metals Company’s own exploratory team — have stressed that we know almost nothing about the deep ocean, least of all how a large-scale mining operation could impact everything from regional biodiversity to the potential extinction of undiscovered animals to ocean carbon sequestration. The nodules alone take millions of years to form.
On Monday, the International Seabed Authority kicked off a two-week-long meeting to discuss potentially issuing the first commercial mining permits. It’s already met staunch opposition: The United Kingdom just came out as the latest nation to demand a moratorium on deep-sea mining, joining calls for a total ban issued by France, Germany, New Zealand, and at least 13 other countries. (The U.S. is not a part of the International Seabed Authority because it was one of only four countries that declined to formally ratify the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1984, thanks to Republican opposition. China, Norway, and Russia are the major proponents pushing for deep-sea mining to open up).
With this as our backdrop, I spoke to Rytz about the making of Deep Rising and the complexities of the deep-sea mining debate. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell me a little bit about how you discovered this story. As the narration points out, deep-sea mining is “out of sight and out of mind” for most people.
I discovered it in 2018 when I was finishing my previous film [Anote’s Ark], and working with the president of Kiribati in the middle of the Pacific. Because of the work I was doing, I had privileged access, since the president was the main character of my film. I started hearing the conversation about deep-sea mining when basically nothing was in the media; it was an absolute unknown story. It really intrigued me. I was like, Wow, this is a very interesting, complex story. I jumped on it and went on the long journey till now.
The U.N.’s International Seabed Authority begins a nearly two-week-long meeting this week that will potentially end with the issuing of the first provisional licenses for deep-sea mining. What has it been like to follow these developments while you’re in the final stages of releasing and promoting this film?
Once the mining code — if the mining code — is ratified, it will be extremely hard to change it. It’s not like in government when you have political football between two parties. Once the regulation is in place, it might take the same amount of time just to make an amendment because you need to get a consensus of all the U.N. members. So it’s a critical time now because they’re actually drafting it and if it passes, the text will define how deep-sea mining will go.
There’s still a chance, actually, to block it or to postpone it. There has been a big wave of countries signing a moratorium and there was very big news yesterday, from the U.K., which is supporting the moratorium. We’ve seen some smaller states sign it; France was a big one, but the U.K. is a significant gain in the movement for a moratorium.
But for me — and this is the story of Deep Rising as well — I’m like, well, okay, sure, let’s say deep-sea mining is stopped by a ban or a moratorium or simply because the mining code doesn’t happen. That doesn’t stop the need for nickel. And that, for me, is the biggest conversation, because if deep-sea mining doesn’t go ahead, it will mean way more pristine ecosystems are torn down in tropical rainforests — mainly in Indonesia, but also New Caledonia, the Philippines, Madagascar, a lot of places. In northern Russia, they’re mining nickel in the tundra and they’re releasing massive amounts of methane.
So for me, it’s not one or the other. Deep-sea mining is better because we’re going to save the rainforest is a fundamentally flawed argument. Because we don’t need nickel in the first place; there are solutions that are not based on finite resources. There’s battery chemistry that is based on iron-phosphate batteries. Green hydrogen is another very good example and a very good debate.
And, you know, we don’t need to buy that many private cars; we need to develop and share resources. When you see the climate bill from President Biden subsidizing every citizen to buy an EV, it’s basically subsidizing removing the pristine ecosystem in Indonesia. I don’t call that a climate plan.
I wanted to ask you about that. The script of Deep Rising can be pretty critical of the energy transition, calling it the “so-called green revolution.” Can you tell me a little about the use of that term, “so-called”?
This is exactly what I mean. You take the narrative of the “green revolution” from the official perspective — the president’s perspective or the industry’s perspective, from President Biden or Elon Musk. Let’s say they have the same narrative: Buy a Tesla and you’re going to save the planet. Because Tesla would not exist without subsidies; every taxpayer in the U.S. has spent massive amounts of money to make it happen. And I’m not against EVs, but it’s important to understand the climate has no boundaries. If you remove the ecosystem in Indonesia, you’re increasing the climate crisis in the U.S., and so on. You’re putting your citizens at risk. Every country is similar.
There’s no reason to go after finite resources like nickel. Again, if there was no solution, it’d maybe be like, “Oh, there’s a trade-off.” But the point is, at a very large, industrial scale, there are solutions to produce energy without extracting finite resources.
In the film, the narration states that “critical metals are not the solution; they are the new oil.” I’m convinced that there could be grave ecological consequences to deep-sea mining, but how do you reconcile that against the grave ecological consequences of the fossil fuels we’re extracting and burning now?
Again, it’s a matter of changing the chemistry of the batteries. If you take the composition of the Earth’s crust, nickel is 0.009%. Iron is 5%. Iron is everywhere. A company like BYD in China, they’ve been very successfully building for like five years now EVs that are as good as Tesla’s with no gram of nickel, no gram of cobalt. Iron and phosphate are widely available. Rivian, in the U.S., they’re also shifting. And that can happen — anytime soon, GM or Ford or Toyota could change their battery chemistry.
Wait — if this is something we have the technology for now, and it’s scaleable, why are mining companies spending all this time and money building deep-sea vacuum cleaners to suck up nodules to power batteries that we don’t even need to be using?
Because there’s a whole supply chain that’s already been built. And when you’re investing billions of dollars to build battery factories, you need to sell enough batteries to recoup your investment. The problem is we made the investment in the wrong direction.
The second problem is political. The EU could ban nickel in the battery and that’d be it. Then Volkswagen and Volvo and BMW and Renault, all the German and French carmakers, would have no choice. I don’t think it’s as easy in the U.S. but in the EU, that’s a move they could do. It’s happening: The U.K. did a moratorium [on deep-sea mining]. France did a total ban. And, of course, some will lose a lot of money, but it’s the right thing to do.
And the Chinese, by the way — most of the domestic market doesn’t use cobalt and nickel. They’re very advanced; the Blade technology from BYD is years ahead. But they’re not exporting that much because of the commercial war, basically.
On your website, you have a manifesto, which states that your aim as a filmmaker is to “ask uncomfortable questions instead of providing reassuring answers.” Can you talk a little about how that philosophy guided your approach to this film in particular?
My background is not in filmmaking; it’s in anthropology. I think because of my upbringing as an intellectual, I can see a system’s complexity. Filmmakers can sometimes cut straight to a conclusion and for me, it’s very challenging because I needed to simplify when making a film. I think I’ve oversimplified already; I see the film and I think “Oh, this is so oversimplified!” even when it’s a very complex film for most of the viewers.
I could have done a film that was just bashing the mining industry, showing how bad they are and how bad capitalists are destroying the planet. The problem with this is, you preach to the choir. The people you actually need to talk to, they will not listen.
Instead, I got invited to speak to the finance sector, the mining sector, a few weeks ago at a big conference in Geneva. Some of the biggest hedge funds and banks — a Swiss bank, a European bank, a Singaporean bank — they were all in the room. They were asking me for advice about if they should have deep-sea mining in their portfolio. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. And I was like, “I can explain to you why you shouldn’t.”
The change is massive when you can tap into the higher side, the financial system, basically. For me, it’s a really interesting goal, because I take this approach so it’s like, “Oh, you’re not just bashing us and saying how bad we are. Let’s set aside our differences and sit down for coffee.”
I wanted to ask about the disagreement within the Pacific Islands communities. On the one hand, you show grassroots resistance to deep-sea mining in Papua New Guinea; on the other, you also show a delegate from Nauru (which sponsors a subsidiary of The Metals Company) pressuring the International Seabed Authority to make a quick decision on commercial licensing. Is the jury still out on deep-sea mining when it comes to regional community support?
There are two forces here. One is that no corporation can apply for a deep-sea mining license. The Metal Company cannot go to Jamaica and say, “I want to mine the deep ocean.” You need to find a country that will sponsor you. So the Metal Company can fly into Nauru, the smallest country in the world, and promise them the moon. Nauru is a very specific story with a long history of extraction with the Commonwealth, with Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. They’ve been mining phosphate since the Second World War. So this is a very specific case.
When it comes to other countries, like Kiribati and a lot of other island nations, they’re kind of under the Chinese now. And there’s a lot of paradox with China because again, the domestic market is very different than the exporting markets. They’re fueling the rest of the world with nickel, so they have six licenses [in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone] and they’re lobbying quite hard now to get deep-sea mining approved. But they own 60% of the nickel capacities globally and the U.S. has 0%. So for the Chinese, they’d still get all this nickel to basically keep the rest of the world dependent on them.
I have to ask about the cinematography, which is absolutely gorgeous. I think a lot of times deep sea animals don’t get the respect of more charismatic environmental icons like polar bears or whales because they look so alien and creepy. But the footage you included really gives this part of the world vibrance, life, and personality.
It came from years and years of digging through hard drives. A lot of the footage comes from scientific expeditions. It was a very long process for me to convince the researchers to give me the license to use their footage, too, because their first reaction was like, “No, it’s scientific material; that specific jellyfish, which is undiscovered, is under embargo.” Which means the scientists haven’t published their paper yet. And I was like, “Guys.”
Is there anything else you’d like our readers to know?
The concept of the common heritage of humankind is very important. It’s outlined in the Law of the Sea, a set of strong rules by the U.N., that the deep sea belongs to humanity. And every citizen of the planet has a shared responsibility to really look at what is happening because it’s the biggest land grab in human history. The mining area is the size of Mongolia. It’s enormous: I mean, imagine if Mongolia, which is an entire country, was mined entirely. It doesn’t make sense. We have a shared responsibility because we know the climate crisis doesn’t have boundaries. Everyone is concerned.
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Current conditions: Bosnia’s capital of Sarajevo is blanketed in a layer of toxic smog • Temperatures in Perth, in Western Australia, could hit 106 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend • It is cloudy in Washington, D.C., where lawmakers are scrambling to prevent a government shutdown.
The weather has gotten so weird that the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is holding internal talks about how to adjust its models to produce more accurate forecasts, the Financial Timesreported. Current models are based on temperature swings observed over one part of the Pacific Ocean that have for years correlated consistently with specific weather phenomena across the globe, but climate change seems to be disrupting that cause and effect pattern, making it harder to predict things like La Niña and El Niño. Many forecasters had expected La Niña to appear by now and help cool things down, but that has yet to happen. “It’s concerning when this region we’ve studied and written all these papers on is not related to all the impacts you’d see with [La Niña],” NOAA’s Michelle L’Heureux told the FT. “That’s when you start going ‘uh-oh’ there may be an issue here we need to resolve.”
There is quite a lot of news coming out of the Department of Energy as the year (and the Biden administration) comes to an end. A few recent updates:
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, does not expect to meet its 2025 or 2030 emissions targets, and is putting the blame on policy, infrastructure, and technology limitations. The company previously pledged to cut its emissions by 35% by next year, and 65% by the end of the decade. Emissions in 2023 were up 4% year-over-year.
Walmart
“While we continue to work toward our aspirational target of zero operational emissions by 2040, progress will not be linear … and depends not only on our own initiatives but also on factors beyond our control,” Walmart’s statement said. “These factors include energy policy and infrastructure in Walmart markets around the world, availability of more cost-effective low-GWP refrigeration and HVAC solutions, and timely emergence of cost-effective technologies for low-carbon heavy tractor transportation (which does not appear likely until the 2030s).”
BlackRock yesterday said it is writing down the value of its Global Renewable Power Fund III following the failure of Northvolt and SolarZero, two companies the fund had invested in. Its net internal rate of return was -0.3% at the end of the third quarter, way down from 11.5% in the second quarter, according toBloomberg. Sectors like EV charging, transmission, and renewable energy generation and storage have been “particularly challenged,” executives said, and some other renewables companies in the portfolio have yet to get in the black, meaning their valuations may be “more subjective and sensitive to evolving dynamics in the industry.”
Flies may be more vulnerable to climate change than bees are, according to a new study published in the Journal of Melittology. The fly haters among us might shrug at the finding, but the researchers insist flies are essential pollinators that help bolster ecosystem biodiversity and agriculture. “It’s time we gave flies some more recognition for their role as pollinators,” said lead author Margarita López-Uribe, who is the Lorenzo Langstroth Early Career Associate Professor of Entomology at Penn State. The study found bees can tolerate higher temperatures than flies, so flies are at greater risk of decline as global temperatures rise. “In alpine and subarctic environments, flies are the primary pollinator,” López-Uribe said. “This study shows us that we have entire regions that could lose their primary pollinator as the climate warms, which could be catastrophic for those ecosystems.”
“No one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded.” –Heatmap’s Jeva Lange writes about the challenges facing climate cinema, and why 2024 might be the year the climate movie grew up.
Whether you agree probably depends on how you define “climate movie” to begin with.
Climate change is the greatest story of our time — but our time doesn’t seem to invent many great stories about climate change. Maybe it’s due to the enormity and urgency of the subject matter: Climate is “important,” and therefore conscripted to the humorless realms of journalism and documentary. Or maybe it’s because of a misunderstanding on the part of producers and storytellers, rooted in an outdated belief that climate change still needs to be explained to an audience, when in reality they don’t need convincing. Maybe there’s just not a great way to have a character mention climate change and not have it feel super cringe.
Whatever the reason, between 2016 and 2020, less than 3% of film and TV scripts used climate-related keywords during their runtime, according to an analysis by media researchers at the University of Southern California. (The situation isn’t as bad in literature, where cli-fi has been going strong since at least 2013.) At least on the surface, this on-screen avoidance of climate change continued in 2024. One of the biggest movies of the summer, Twisters, had an extreme weather angle sitting right there, but its director, Lee Isaac Chung, went out of his way to ensure the film didn’t have a climate change “message.”
I have a slightly different take on the situation, though — that 2024 was actuallyfull of climate movies, and, I’d argue, that they’re getting much closer to the kinds of stories a climate-concerned individual should want on screen.
That’s because for the most part, when movies and TV shows have tackled the topic of climate change in the past, it’s been with the sort of “simplistic anger-stoking and pathos-wringing” that The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identified in 2022’s Don’t Look Up, the Adam McKay satire that became the primary touchpoint for scripted climate stories. At least it was kind of funny: More overt climate stories like last year’s Foe, starring Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal, and Extrapolations, the Apple TV+ show in which Meryl Streep voices a whale, are so self-righteous as to be unwatchable (not to mention, no fun).
But what if we widened our lens and weren’t so prescriptive? Then maybe Furiosa, this spring’s Mad Max prequel, becomes a climate change movie. The film is set during a “near future” ecological collapse, and it certainly makes you think about water scarcity and our overreliance on a finite extracted resource — but it also makes you think about how badass the Octoboss’ kite is. The same goes for Dune: Part Two, which made over $82 million in its opening weekend and is also a recognizable environmental allegory featuring some cool worms. Even Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, a flop that most people have already memory-holed, revisitedThe Day After Tomorrow’s question of, “What if New York City got really, really, really cold?”
Two 2024 animated films with climate themes could even compete against each other at the Academy Awards next year. Dreamworks Animation’s The Wild Robot, one of the centerpiece films at this fall’s inaugural Climate Film Festival, is set in a world where sea levels have risen to submerge the Golden Gate Bridge, and it impresses on its audience the importance of protecting the natural world. And in Gints Zilbalodis’ Flow, one of my favorite films of the year, a cat must band together with other animals to survive a flood.
Flow also raises the question of whether a project can unintentionally be a climate movie. Zilbalodis told me that making a point about environmental catastrophe wasn’t his intention — “I can’t really start with the message, I have to start with the character,” he said — and to him, the water is a visual metaphor in an allegory about overcoming your fears.
But watching the movie in a year when more than a thousand people worldwide have died in floods, and with images of inundated towns in North Carolina still fresh in mind, it’s actually climate change itself that makes one watch Flow as a movie about climate change. (I’m not the only one with this interpretation, either: Zilbalodis told me he’d been asked by one young audience member if the flood depicted in his film is “the future.”)
Perhaps this is how we should also consider Chung’s comments about Twisters. While nobody in the film says the words “climate change” or “global warming,” the characters note that storms are becoming exceptional — “we've never seen tornadoes like this before,” one says. Despite the director’s stated intention not to make the movie “about” climate change, it becomes a climate movie by virtue of what its audiences have experienced in their own lives.
Still, there’s that niggling question: Do movies like these, which approach climate themes slant-wise, really count? To help me decide, I turned to Sam Read, the executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, an advocacy consortium that encourages environmental awareness both on set and on screen. He told me that to qualify something as a “climate” movie or TV show, some research groups look to see if climate change exists in the world of the story or whether the characters acknowledge it. Other groups consider climate in tiers, such as whether a project has a climate premise, theme, or simply a moment.
The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, however, has no hard rules. “We want to make sure that we support creatives in integrating these stories in whatever way works for them,” Read told me.
Read also confirmed my belief that there seemed to be an uptick in movies this year that were “not about climate change but still deal with things that feel very climate-related, like resource extraction.” There was even more progress on this front in television, he pointed out: True Detective: Night Country wove in themes of environmentalism, pollution, mining, and Indigenous stewardship; the Max comedy Hacks featured an episode about climate change this season; and Industry involved a storyline about taking a clean energy company public, with some of the characters even attending COP. Even Doctor Odyssey, a cruise ship medical drama that airs on USA, worked climate change into its script, albeit in ridiculous ways. (Also worth mentioning: The Netflix dating show Love is Blind cast Taylor Krause, who works on decarbonizing heavy industry at RMI.)
We can certainly do more. As many critics before me have written, it’s still important to draw a connection between things like environmental catastrophes and the real-world human causes of global warming. But the difference between something being “a climate movie” and propaganda — however true its message, or however well-intentioned — is thin. Besides, no one goes to the movies because they want to be scolded; we want to be moved and distracted and entertained.
I’ve done my fair share of complaining over the past few years about how climate storytelling needs to grow up. But lately I’ve been coming around to the idea that it’s not the words “climate change” appearing in a script that we need to be so focused on. As 2024’s slate of films has proven to me — or, perhaps, as this year’s extreme weather events have thrown into relief — there are climate movies everywhere.
Keep ‘em coming.
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress.
It died earlier this week, although you could be forgiven for missing it. On Tuesday, bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes — pushed for by Representative Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee — would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decisionmaking.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal, as I detailed last week, would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new, quasi-mandatory scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Rest in peace, I suppose. Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, I think Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. (I still believe that the standalone deal could have passed the Senate and the House if put to a vote.) At this point, I do not think we will see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
But it is difficult to get too upset about this failure because larger mistakes have since compounded the initial one. On Wednesday, Republican Speaker Mike Johnson’s bipartisan deal to fund the government — which is, after all, a much more fundamental task of governance than rewriting some federal permitting laws — fell apart, seemingly because Donald Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn’t like it. If I can indulge in the subjunctive for a moment: That breakdown might have likely killed any potential permitting deal, too. So even in a world where lawmakers somehow did strike a deal earlier this week, it might already be dead. (As I write this, the House GOP has reportedly reached a new deal to fund the government through March, which has weakened or removed provisions governing pharmacy benefit managers and limiting American investments in China.)
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, will lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and will approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — and while those protections are not a must-have, especially with a friendly Supreme Court, their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem quite likely to run aground, at least as long as something like the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. I have heard some crazy proposals on this topic — what if skipping a permitting fight somehow became a revenue-raiser for the federal government? — but even they do not touch the deep structure of NEPA in the way a bipartisan compromise could. As Westerman toldPolitico’s Josh Siegel: “We need 60 votes in the Senate to get real permitting reform … People are just going to have to come to an agreement on what permitting reform is.” In any case, Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Even if reconciliation fails, Republicans say, they will still be in a better negotiating position next year than this year because the party will control a few more Senate votes. But will they? The GOP will just have come off a difficult fight over tax reform. Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
In any case, savvy Republicans should have realized that it is important to get supply-side economic reforms done as early in a president’s four-year term as possible. Such changes take time to filter through the system and turn into real projects and real economic activity; passing the law as early as possible means that the president’s party can enjoy them and campaign on them.
All of it starts to seem more and more familiar. When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats, I think, wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. I think it will be a mistake for Republicans, too.